


White Like Fire

by Gruoch



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Endgame gap filler, Gen, Moving Out, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unresolved Trauma, but not moving on, confronting grief over child loss, metaphorical hauntings, packing up, post-apocalyptic wellness checks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-29 01:05:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18768046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gruoch/pseuds/Gruoch
Summary: “Sorry about the mess,” May says as she shuts the door behind him. “I’m right in the middle of packing.”“You’re moving?” Tony manages to ask.





	White Like Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Just to be safe: there's nothing particularly spoiler-y about this fic, but it is set during Endgame.
> 
> I swore I was never going to touch Endgame, but then the new Far From Home trailer gave me Sad Feelings and this is how I cope. After this it's back to normal programming, by which I mean living in a blissful world where everyone is together and happy, thank you very much.
> 
> I'm going here on what the Russos have said about May surviving the Snap, ~~even tho they are little trolls and might be bs-ing~~

Sunday morning—Tony makes the drive down to the city through thick fog, a paper bag full of tomatoes perched precariously in the passenger seat beside him.

He’s made this drive every couple of months since uprooting everything to the lake house, but the eerie emptiness of the roads, overhung with ragged curtains of dense fog, still unsettles him. It makes him think of Chernobyl or North Brother Island, and then he remembers that this isn’t some isolated, post-apocalyptic ghost town, that he would find this graveyard silence in every city across the globe and out into the far, unfathomable reaches of the universe.

He pulls over and gets out of the car, stands in the chilly damp air and puffs on a cigarette taken from the pack taped to the underside of the dashboard—an old vice he’s re-adopted and the one secret he keeps from Pepper after their marriage. Water droplets condense in his hair while he hacks a painful cough into his fist and pinches out the unfinished cigarette, flicking it into the wild overgrown underbrush devouring the road’s shoulder. Then he gets back into the car to finish his journey, speeding down the deserted roads, the quiet hum of the engine the only sound breaking a silence and stillness so profound it might as well be like driving through the vacuum of space.

****

The city cleanup crews still haven’t reached many of the neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Tony navigates past rusted-out abandoned cars, many with their windows smashed out, and veritable mountains of garbage and broken furniture that block the sidewalks and crowd into the street. Someone is burning tires somewhere, and the acrid chemical odor of it stings Tony’s nose and makes his eyes water. He makes a mental note to get his own crew out here again, have them clear the trash from the curb at the very least.

He reaches his final destination and parks the car in the middle of the street outside of the residential building. He grabs the bag of tomatoes, their red hue almost electrically vibrant in the washed-out grey of their current surroundings, and heads inside. He makes his way up to the seventh floor, past more garbage piled in the stairwell, regretting the cigarette somewhere around the fifth flight of stairs as he wheezes laboriously, lungs burning.

He stops for a minute in the hallway outside of the door to the apartment to catch his breath and collect himself before knocking, a sharp rhythmic tattoo to identify himself.

The door opens halfway a few beats later, and May pops her head around it. Her face breaks into a tired smile at the sight of him.

“You’re late,” she says. “I was getting worried.”

“Sorry. It was the stairs. My age is catching up to me. One of these days you’re gonna find me keeled over in the stairwell with all the other garbage—a fitting final resting place, I suppose,” Tony replies. He holds up the bag in his arms. “I brought you some tomatoes from my garden. I’m trying a new composting method. Lots of banana peels in this formula. The potassium is supposed to be good for…something. I can’t remember. Pepper has the green thumb, really. Can you get bananas in the grocery stores here? If not I can get you some through _very_ slightly illegal avenues.”

May smiles broader and takes the bag. “You’re so benevolent towards us peasants, especially now that you’ve been domesticated. But I can live without bananas. It’s surprising, what you find you can live without.”

She opens the door wider and stands aside, motioning Tony through the doorway. 

He passes by her and sees that the living room is full of half-packed cardboard boxes. The table and countertops in the kitchen are covered with pots and pans and stacks of plates and bowls wrapped in newspaper, the cabinet doors open to reveal empty shelves. The sight stops him short, like a punch to the gut.

“Sorry about the mess,” May says as she shuts the door behind him. “I’m right in the middle of packing.”

“You’re moving?” Tony manages to ask.

May nods, not looking at him as she sets the bag of tomatoes on top of a box. “Yeah. I found a nice little place within walking distance to work. This is a little ugly to say, you know, after...but I can finally afford to live there. Rent’s down so much all over the city, and...”

She trails off. Her expression is calm, but her hands move restlessly inside of the sleeves of her oversized sweater.

“Anyway,” she says, with manufactured breeziness. “It’s good timing you came now. You can go through things, if you want. Maybe there’s something you’d like to take home. Whatever you like. I’m only keeping a few things.”

Tony knows what things she means. It’s like a blow to the chest, that old unhealed wound breaking open again.

“I can help you pack it up, if you want,” he offers in a low voice.

She nods once, pressing her sleeve briefly to her nose. “Sure. It’s not a lot. I’m really—I just need to get it sorted and cleared out, is all.”

She turns and starts across the room towards the hallway before Tony can say anything else. He follows after her to the smaller of the two bedrooms at the rear of the apartment. They both stop for a moment at the threshold, standing shoulder to shoulder in the narrow doorway.

May has kept Peter's bedroom exactly as he left it three years ago, like a museum diorama, or a shrine. Like he could come home at any moment and step right back into life, pick up exactly where he left off. The only difference now is that a pair of clear plastic storage bins have been stacked under the window. The bins are already full, their lids sealed with strips of packing tape. A garbage bag lies on the floor next to them, one of the big, black, heavy-duty kind used for yard waste and demolition jobs.

May breaks first, squeezing past Tony into the room. She gestures to the bins.

“That’s what I’m keeping. So. Anything else is up for grabs. Just help yourself. I can get you a box if you need one.”

Tony follows her into the room, slowly curling and uncurling his left hand into a fist. He runs the fingers of his other hand along Peter’s desk, the top of it still overflowing with books and papers and incomplete calculus homework. A life interrupted and unfinished.

“What will you do with the rest of it?” he asks.

“Throw it away,” May replies, motioning to the garbage bag.

Tony looks at her sharply, but she’s already turned away from him and started rummaging through the closet. Tony watches her back for a long moment, struggling against a sudden sense of claustrophobia and the sound of his own blood rushing in his ears.

He reaches for the desk again, for something solid to ground himself, and his hand finds one of the notebooks resting in a haphazard stack on top of Peter’s beat up laptop. He opens its cover and thumbs through the pages. The inside is a mess of jumbled notes and doodles. The kid wrote the same way he talked, rambling and disjointed and brilliant. Every now again Tony spies his own handwriting woven into the scramble—brief words of correction and suggestion and encouragement. 

He closes the notebook. He can feel a tightness forming behind his left eye, the harbinger of a migraine. 

“Can you grab the stuff under the bed?” May asks as she takes clothes out of the closet and lays them over the back of the desk chair.

“That’s a little scary—looking under a teenage boy’s bed,” Tony says as he goes over to the bed and gets down on his hands and knees to peer under it. “Should I put gloves on first?”

“It’s just socks and underwear. _Clean_ socks and underwear,” May answers, dumping more clothes on the chair. “Maybe some sweaters. And some textbooks. Those should probably be put aside. I’ll donate them somewhere.”

Tony reaches into the darkness under the bed and drags out another clear bin, this one full of socks and undergarments, as promised. He sets the box on top of the bed.

“There are two containers full of Legos in here,” May says, her voice slightly muffled as she leans into the closet. “Do you want them for Morgan? She’s probably too little for them now, but she might like them in a couple more years. Ben paid a small fortune for them—I’d feel good knowing they were still being enjoyed.”

“Oh, sure. She’ll love them,” Tony says, rummaging around under the bed again. He feels something slide under his fingertips. He pulls it across the carpet towards him and lifts it into the light. It’s a brochure from MIT for prospective students. Tony can remember giving it to Peter, the way the kid had rolled his eyes while Tony had, for the thousandth time, pressed him—gently but firmly—to consider applying. _You need to be thinking about your future,_ Tony had told him. 

He carefully lays the brochure on the bed alongside the bin of socks and bites the inside of his cheek until he can taste copper. The room feels too warm or too small now, every lungful of air an effort. He wonders why he thought he could do this, how he could ever possibly help pick this room apart and strip it bare. Make it look like the boy who lived and breathed here never existed.

Beside him, May is gathering up an armful of Peter’s clothes from the chair. She holds the bundle against her chest for a moment, her free hand lightly stroking the cloth. She’s still wearing the same serene expression she’s had since opening the door for Tony, but he can see a muscle in her jaw working minutely as she looks down at the clothes in her arms.

Then she reaches for the black garbage bag, shaking it open before setting the clothes carefully inside.

“What are you going to do with all that?” Tony asks, his heart loud in his ears again, beating like a fist against his sternum.

“I told you, I’m throwing it away,” May says calmly, gathering up another armful to place inside the bag.

Tony sits frozen in place there on his knees while a wave of deep-seated dread crests over him. He watches her put more clothes in the bag, but in his mind he is billions of miles away on a desolate planet, watching ashes slip through his fingers to be swept up by the wind, swept into nothingness.

“Don’t do this.”

The plea escapes his mouth quietly, but it’s as raw as an exposed nerve. 

May doesn’t look at him. She just stands with the bag in her hands, as still and unyielding as a statue.

“I mean, why do you have to do this—why throw any of it away?” Tony asks, still on his knees, half-begging while she continues to stand motionless and silent, refusing to look at him. “Why would you—this stuff, this place...that’s _him_ , May. That’s Peter. That’s all that’s left.” He takes a shuddering breath. “Jesus—there wasn’t even a body to bury.”

“Tony,” May murmurs at last, delicately. “Do you hear yourself? You have a wife and a beautiful little girl. You’ve made a wonderful home and a wonderful life with them. And that’s exactly what you should have done. What you should be doing. But you can’t come here now and ask me to stay here, like...like the gatekeeper of a mausoleum. And that’s what this is now. There’s nothing but ghosts here for me. I can’t live like this anymore. I’ve tried and I’ve tried, and I can’t...There’s a lot of people who still need help—I can’t help them like this.”

“Then don’t. Just—leave it,” Tony continues, an unbearable pressure growing in his chest. “Sign the lease over to me. I’ll keep paying the rent. Okay?”

May shakes her head. “Tony...”

“We just—we don’t know, May,” he says in a rush, frantic to make her understand. “We don’t know what could happen—I’ve seen things, impossible things—”

“Don’t you dare,” May tells him, her voice shaking with fury and grief as her calm facade fractures. “Don’t you dare come here and say that, after all this time, after _everything_ —don’t you dare try to—”

She turns away abruptly and grabs a notebook off of the desk, stuffing it down into the trash bag almost savagely.

Tony lunges forward and grabs her around the thighs, driven by some kind of animal desperation he’s never felt before. He wrestles her away from the bag and she hits him, beating her small fists against his head and shoulders in a rain of sharp stinging blows, but it’s the sound of her ragged sobbing that brings him to his senses.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he mumbles helplessly, clinging to her now and pressing his face into her stomach like a wounded child. He looks up at her through a veil of unshed tears. “God, _please,_ I’m so sorry.”

She slaps him, making a little pained cry as she does like she’s the one who’s been struck.

“Stop it! Stop it—stop saying that!” she sobs out. “I can’t stand it anymore. Stop asking me for that.”

She slaps him again, weakly, and then she clutches his face in her hands, collapsing over him and burying her own face in the crown of his head. They hold each other like that for an indeterminate amount of time, Tony feeling her tears wetting his hair, until finally she slowly rises up once more.

May looks down at him, still holding his face cupped in her hands. There are tears running down her cheeks, but her expression is calm again. 

“Tell me what you want to keep,” she says evenly. “And then I want you to take it and go. Go home to your family, and don’t ever, _ever_ come back here again. If I find out you—you bought this building, or…We’ll be done for good, you understand me? So don’t come back here. Tony—you _can’t_ keep coming back here. He wouldn’t want you to keep coming back.”

Tony swallows down his grief, nodding. He lets her go and gets to his feet slowly. He runs a hand down his face, clears his throat, trying to put himself back together again. He feels like he's been shattered so many times now that all the rough edged pieces no longer quite fit. 

“The notebooks,” he says finally, his voice thick. “I want the notebooks, and— _god damn it,_ give me the whole fucking lot. Everything. I’ll box it up, put it in storage. I won’t touch it, I swear, I won’t even look at it, I won’t—Jesus. Just let me have it. _Please._ ”

May looks at him for a long moment, her eyes sorrowful, and then she nods once.

Tony releases a pent up breath. He picks the black bag up and empties its contents onto the bed. He reaches for the clothes, attempting to fold them up but finding that his hands are shaking too badly. He grabs the notebook instead, and then the rest of the ones still on the desk.

“I’ll have Happy come tomorrow and pack everything up,” he tells May, finding now that he’s the one who can’t look at her. “If you need anything else, just ask. You can always ask.”

“I know,” she says quietly.

He lingers for a moment longer, looking around the room one last time, choking on the painful tightness in his throat. He tucks the notebooks under his arm protectively.

“Alright. I’ll get out of your way.”

He steps past her, out into the hallway. May follows after him across the living room to the entrance door.

“Tony,” she says when his hand is on the door knob.

He turns and makes himself look at her, standing small and pale and ghostlike among the boxed-up remnants of her life. There are tears on her cheeks still, and her eyes shine in the dim muddy sunlight that streams weakly through the living room windows.

“Send me your new address once you get settled,” he says. “I’ll bring you a housewarming gift.” 

“I will.”

Tony searches her face. “You’ll be okay?”

May gives him a brittle smile. “Of course. We’ll both be okay. We’re survivors, you and me.” Her mouth softens. “Bring your sweet baby next time. Tomatoes are nice, but baby kisses are better. Makes you feel like there’s still something to hope for.”

“I can do that,” Tony agrees, reaching out and brushing away the tear tracks on her cheeks with the back of his fingers.

“Goodbye, Tony,” she says.

“Goodbye, May.”

He leaves and makes his way back down all the flights of stairs, past the garbage and decay. He gets into his car, setting the stack of notebooks carefully on the passenger seat, and then starts the journey home, through the empty, silent streets to the life that still awaits him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!
> 
> I'm also on [tumblr](https://groo-ock.tumblr.com/)


End file.
